While such people have a niche use of static libs, we all know that the
actual USE of static libs require a lot of hands-on and funny compiler
flags.

I never had to do anything funny to compile statically my numerical models.

But it is very possible that my use (scientific numerical models) are not
a target for Fedora, which is more targeted for network and desktop?

(and yes, of course I can recompile myself the numerical libs I use, liek

gsl, lapack, fftw, and redistribute them at the labs where I have some
fedora, as rpm or with other mean). But it is a waste of time and resources
if there is a more widespread use.

IMHO, if you are building your own numerical crunching apps, then you
probably would be better off controlling all aspects of building each
static portion of it. This means writing your own scripts and tuning
compile flags of portions of the app to maximize performance. This may
also mean applying your own patches that may be unsuitable for a more
general purpose distribution.

If you rely on a distribution's static libraries, then there is no
guarantee in the future that those static libs will remain unchanged in
API, so if you ever need to rebuild your app with a tiny change you
could be affected by far more than the change that you expected.